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Late in life my husband wrote poetry. At first I thought it amusing, endearing, that he would sit in his leather chair, foolscap tablet propped on his long legs, and scrawl words and lines, crossing out, starting over, staring out the window, concentrating.
At first he would ask me if I would mind typing up what he had written, commenting on it.. I didn’t mind – after all, I was a teacher and critiquing writing is what I’d done all my life. And I thought this hobby of his was “sweet.” But he wanted to be corrected; he listened to suggestions, reworked his poems.
Were they poems? What was a poem? He didn’t care about rhyme—it was the essence of something he wanted to capture. I’d try to concentrate on what I thought he wanted to say—his sense of grammar, of flow, was often confusing–and make suggestions.
One suggestion was why didn’t he take a poetry class at City College? After all, I was teaching there and knew the instructors who taught poetry and could recommend them.
A good idea, he thought.
And so began more tablets and then his wanting his own computer and printer to complete assignments. The first big assignment he had in his first poetry class was a portfolio of his work that semester. I never saw such labor! Such pride! He even chose a special tape to hold the cover together – – an enhancement of his slim collection.
From there he took another semester with the same instructor who, quite frankly, is wonderful and encouraging, and then another instructor and then back to the first who, although we had rules about notauditing, let my husband join the class anyway.
He went to readings at Bird and Beckett and took a few sessions with old poets who often offered such things.
By now he had an entire file drawer filled with folders of his poems, in alphabetical order, each folder containing all of a poem’s incarnations. He owned his own Soules’ Dictionary of English Synonyms, which he studied the way some do Bible passages.
He signed up for courses at OLLI, then, classes with his favorite: Kim Addonizio, for full semesters of on-line Kim. Kim was fond of him—who wouldn’t be of someone so earnest and reliable about writing? He read at a mike she had rigged up at her house, a party she had invited us to, thrilling me, along for the ride then. Together we attended a weekend of workshops in Montreal—me in fiction, he in poetry. A thrilling weekend of being writers together.
Were his poems good? Does it matter? Were they love poems? Yes, a few were, but not in the ordinary manner. He wrote his observations about . . . well, about many things. The noise of trash trucks in the morning, the Chit-Chat café at Pacifica, his motorcycle and the feel of the road, and a few about us, but not in the ordinary sense. For instance, he began a poem with “We are the conspirators. . .” which I took as a compliment, a nod to our unity, our clarity of mutual vision, of changing our lives as we did.
Then he died. I sorted through and chose a number of his poems and, with the help of a friend, published a slim volume, naming it after a line from one of his poems: What Can’t Be Said in Any Other Way.
But he did say it. That little book is my big love poem from him.